Integrated Workflows. Running as a “digital business” is an objective of many companies. It means digitizing and automating many more processes than a traditional business. That requires automation that can execute a process that is multi-step and multi-system in most cases. It’s exactly the kind of solution highlighted recently in a webinar Scribe produced on BiyCloud’s LLodi solution (watch it here). First of all, let’s be clear, LLodi is a breakthrough in analytics. It allows analysts to initiate actions from within interactive dashboards from Qlik, Tableau, and Microsoft Power BI. Imagine using an interactive dashboard to explore your data set, having an “aha moment” that a product is highly price sensitive and then launching a new price promotion in a specific region – simply by clicking a button and entering a few parameters from that very same dashboard. All the system coordination required to make it happen then happens automatically, including the creation of the campaign in your Salesforce CRM or the assigning of tasks to specific sales reps. LLodi brings “interactive analytics” to a new level, allowing analysts to drive change as soon as they reach their conclusions. (Read the BiyCloud case study).

New LLodi Cloud Service Enhances Interactive Dashboards from Qlik, Tableau and Microsoft Power BI with Controls to Initiate Real-time Workflows Whenever Insights Are Discovered.

Interactive dashboards and analytics have emerged as a preferred way for today’s business professionals to gain the insights they need to effectively meet evolving customer demands and drive revenue. But these same dashboards often fail to provide a means to act on the insights they deliver. Instead, business decision makers and analysts typically need to separately access CRM, marketing automation, ERP or other business systems to act on the analytics insights discovered in their business intelligence (BI) tools – which can delay or even prevent meaningful business improvements.

BiyCloud, a global leader in BI services in the cloud, set a goal to address this gap. They saw an opportunity to transform BI/analytics processes by creating closed-loop, completely interactive analytic systems that could seamlessly trigger workflows and actions in other business systems. BiyCloud selected Scribe Online, Scribe Software’s integration platform as a service (iPaaS), to build its interactive data intelligence integration solution. This solution turns analytics dashboards from leading BI providers such as Qlik, Tableau, and Microsoft Power BI into bi-directional interactive analytics systems, which empower users to initiate actions in other business systems directly from their BI tool of choice. The result is BiyCloud’s LLodi – a cloud-based, connected data intelligence solution, delivering real-time integrations with direct impact to the business.

Business Intelligence: Interactivity Leads to Competitive Advantage

Over the past decade, business intelligence systems have evolved from static reporting systems to include interactive visualization tools and dashboards for exploration and data discovery. Tableau, Qlik, and Microsoft Power BI became leaders in this field because they reduce the cost and time to create analytics and give business users the ability to explore data freely, without being limited by static views or fixed filtering criteria.

The result: more people than ever have access to business data, and have far more powerful analytic tools at their fingertips. In addition, the companies that have embraced these interactive analytics have become more agile and have more opportunities to gain competitive advantage. They use interactive analytics in areas such as customer segmentation, product innovation, and sales and marketing performance, while competitors that have not embraced interactive analytics can suffer from a lack of customer insight and slower response times.

A Glaring Gap: Data Intelligence Integration

Interactive dashboards, however, are only as powerful as the data they hold, so companies that can easily assimilate data from multiple sources into their dashboards ultimately get the best insights. Even still, a glaring gap still exists for many BI users – data interactivity doesn’t automatically translate to an ability to respond to those insights in real time.

“Business intelligence tools have become more interactive, but far too often they are still leading people down a dead-end road,” said Juan Hortal, CEO of BiyCloud. “We hear all the time from organizations that they want the ability to act on their discoveries directly from the interactive dashboards instead of having to go outside of the business intelligence tool to take action. We saw this as a critical deficiency in BI, but also an opportunity to add great value.”

Making Interactive Dashboards Bi-directional with LLodi and Scribe

BiyCloud set out to make interactive dashboards into bi-directional systems, using data integration to not only bring data into the analytics from multiple sources, but also to give users the power to send action requests out to other systems directly from the dashboards.

“We were familiar with the Scribe iPaaS because of its ability to quickly get data flowing in real-time between important business systems such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SAP, and Netsuite,” said Nacho Bibian, Head of Operations, BiyCloud. “Scribe’s focus on ease of use and agility was a perfect fit for the expectations of customers using interactive dashboards from Tableau, Qlik, and Microsoft Power BI.”

Scribe’s Request/Reply capability, which is used to develop event-driven integration flows, gave BiyCloud the ability to add controls to Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI dashboards that could initiate actions within the source systems.

“Scribe’s Request/Reply capability is very powerful. With it we give users the ability to act on insights immediately when they make a discovery,” said Nacho Bibian. “Scribe gave us the power to create a host of workflows requested by our users, including workflows that reach out to other business systems to exchange data, create tasks, or spur other actions. Now, with just a single click, users can drive action in multiple systems without ever having to contact IT or even leave the dashboard that fueled their decision. That kind of immediacy is what inspired us to build LLodi.”

LLodi is a SaaS-based solution that can be added on to any BI application, requiring no modifications to the BI application itself. It consists of a widget to handle communication between the application and other systems of interest, as well as a platform to manage, control, edit and monitor the business processes that the widget initiates. The Scribe iPaaS actually manages the bi-directional data flow between the BI application and other systems and orchestrates the workflows requested by the user. The combination of LLodi and an interactive visualization or dashboard allows business users to discover new insights and quickly act on those insights to improve data quality or business performance.

Two examples of LLodi in action include:

1. A sales manager uses a Qlik dashboard to analyze aggregated sales performance data. Based on the data, he decides to boost sales in one region by running a new promotion. Using the LLodi widget on the dashboard, he enters the Product Category, Region, Discount Level, and Promotion Duration in days. When he pushes the Submit button, LLodi creates a campaign in Salesforce, and within the campaign it creates a task for each sales representative in the region and an opportunity for each account in the region. LLodi also inserts details taken from the BI application, such as the probability of success and the expected revenue. Previously, to achieve the same outcome, the sales manager would have signed into Salesforce and manually setup the campaign and each task and opportunity.

2. A marketer uses Tableau to analyze sales data and segment accounts based on a recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) analysis. Once the marketer determines the rating for a specific account, she clicks on the LLodi widget, enters the rating for the account and hits Submit. LLodi sends the request to Microsoft Dynamics CRM to update the Rating Group of the account with the correct value. It is a seamless workflow that allows the marketer to enhance the data in the source system without having to leave the dashboard or her analysis process.

Integration is a Critical Success Factor: Scribe Software

The driving force of LLodi is its ability to integrate among leading business intelligence systems and business and marketing operations systems. Scribe’s Web API also allows LLodi to get data from on-premises and cloud systems into and out of business intelligence tools in near real-time.

LLodi comes with a library of pre-configured workflow elements for Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI partners who want to add LLodi’s actionable components to the dashboards they create for clients. It is also available to Integration Partners that want to develop custom workflows or unique industry solutions. In either case, the combined BiyCloud and Scribe solution is intuitive enough to empower non-technical users to configure and analyze data without being programming experts.

LLodi’s Benefits

For customers:
• User Independence: Empowers business users to initiate actions in other systems, such as fixing incorrect data or creating tasks for sales representatives, without IT support.
• Improved Agility: Transmits real-time decisions to marketing, sales, operations, and other systems for immediate action.
• Easy Setup: Ability to add actionable controls to any existing interactive dashboard from Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI. Requires virtually no modifications to existing dashboards.

For partners:
• A Powerful Ecosystem: LLodi can initiate workflows in dozens of leading applications, so business intelligence partners have unending opportunities to create custom solutions.
• A Customizable Widget: The heavy lifting is already done. Business intelligence partners simply customize aesthetic elements (labels, folders, etc.) and make the widget available to customers.
• Extended Integration: Leveraging BiyCloud’s template, integration partners can create their own maps and extend the solution into other applications to meet a more varied set of needs for their clients.
• A Value Add: For all partners, LLodi provides the opportunity to create new revenue streams quickly and easily.

Qlik’s technology is advancing incredibly fast in order to meet organization’s expectations which, as had never been before, combine data with powerful visualizations to impulse their businesses.

Apart from that, the typical business management tools incorporate modules that allow to develop some phases of the project Analytics, looking to combine in an only place operations and analysis. There can be found clear examples in Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo or Netsuite.

This attempt is still not enough because it doesn’t explore the multiple possibilites that today’s Qlik’s platform technology is allowing: Big Data, Self Service, Data Integration, Data Management and Governance, API, cloud, etc.

From our point of view and taking more and more into account the necessity to offer the user an environment in which he/she can integrate intelligence and operations, analytic applications the way we know them are in their way to extinction.

The companies require a conversion of their Dashboards into data based applications, in which they can combine data with powerful visualizations and act in real time on those very data. That’s the moment when Llodi comes into play: the first Data Intelligence Integration cloud platform that promotes and automates business processes based on data analysis.

Up until now, integration tools have provided the service to create a unique image of corporate data, to be later exploited with analytical solutions. Now, thanks to LLodi, supported on the powerful integration platform of Scribe Online, the circle is closed performing operations that act directly on the main data origins.

In Qlik’s case, Llodi is integrated through an extension directly integrated in Qlik’s applications or web applications. (Qlik Market)

Llodi allows us to integrate analyzed data or even the very analysis with the original sources, convert processes within the application and transfer and transact in other areas.

How is this reflected in the corporate everyday?

After the analysis, the user combines intelligence with real time execution of an action, creating or modifying the data in management applications.

Good examples for this are sales applications, billing, automation of marketing actions, etc.

The new Analytics era begins.

We recommend you to play the webinar where we explain a practical case of application creation in Qlik Sense with Salesforce integration.

The professionals related to the technology sector have been knowing of “Data Integration” as a concept for a long time. If we were to search in Wikipedia, we would find the following definition:

“Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of these data. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (when two similar companies need to merge their databases) and scientific (combining research results from different bioinformatics repositories, for example) domains. Data integration appears with increasing frequency as the volume and the need to share existing data explodes. It has become the focus of extensive theoretical work, and numerous open problems remain unsolved.”

In the present context and in all fields, we are living a revolution that means a transformation from the analog era to the digital one. Thanks to this change, the companies have not only the need to adapt their business processes, but also the opportunity more than ever to impulse their business through this era’s protagonist: THE DATUM.

The amount of numbers and diverse applications that generate data in companies is growing and growing, that is why we have a critical element that is the necessity to integrate those data in order to have a unique vision.

For this reason there has been a proliferation of cloud platforms and services that offer us the possibility to integrate easily the data, transactional systems that accumulate information generating an important cost reduction and the possibility to detect business opportunities in real time.

In this sense, now more and more, the companies implement solutions of Business Intelligence in different areas, what allows users to turn data into knowledge as an essential backing for correct decision making.

This scene, which as we said before has the datum as a protagonist, requires of a system capable of combining data visualization with the rest of company management applications. What if it were possible to integrate the data once “analyzed” with the rest of applications? What if the analysis itself had a direct impact on how those data are integrated? There should be a solution capable of closing the decision making process circle easing the execution of the measures that this comes with.

This singularity turns ‘Data Integration’ into what we denominated ‘Data Intelligence Integration’.

Let’s simply imagine the applications that this solution can have in the sales department of any company: it could detect business opportunities for cross selling or upselling and plan actions in their CRM, it could perform consultative selling processes and generate opportunities, it could prepare tasks for the salespeople for a particular group of clients, or propose products or services to their clients according to the behaviour pattern of other clients, etc. This way we can design infinite possibilities according to the casuistry and the specific needs that we can transport to other areas of the company that we will be revealing in successive posts with all detail.

We hope our approach seems you interesting and, above all, a useful reality for all days of the business user.

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